Field of Invention
This invention generally relates to learning the behavior of a user navigating and selecting content on input and display constrained devices. More specifically, the invention relates to using the learned navigation and selection behavior data to personalize the user's interactions with various service providers and content query systems, e.g., to better find results to queries provided by the user and to order the results for presentation to the user.
Description of Related Art
The acid test for the usability of an information finding system on input constrained and display constrained devices is the effort expended by the user in the discovery of desired information (the discovery of information could be text based search, browsing a content space, or some combination of both). The effort expended by the user is the number of steps involved in interacting with an information finding system to discover the desired information. Each click of a button, or a scroll motion, or the entry of a character, would be perceived by the user as expended effort. The success of any user interface may be determined by this metric.
Minimizing the effort expended to find information (be it search or browse) is a challenging problem on input and display constrained devices such as mobile phones and televisions. The method of discovery the user chooses may vary upon the application context and the user intent—for example, a user may, from past habit, browse through the phonebook to a contact to make a call (especially when the contact list is small), or perform text input when searching for a web site. Browse based navigation is typically used (and is effective) when the user's intent is broad. Furthermore it is a viable form of navigation only when the content space is not very large at any level of navigation of the content space hierarchy—only text-based search is effective for content spaces that are large. Any solution however, needs to solve the “minimal effort” problem for both these forms of discovery.